It wouldn’t be surprising to see students who aren’t interested in topic and not motivated to learn, at best they may put efforts to get good grade and that’s that. Despite advances in learning sciences, classroom often treats as a rigid environment isolated from the real world, in which teacher is authority. In such environment, the existence of mere communication between members, wouldn’t help that much to increase relational capacity among students, as well as teacher and students, in a way that the setting serves as a welcoming climate which shapes a community of scholars. In such environment, if there is attention to acquiring knowledge, it’s more often because of earning high grade and not necessarily enhancing knowledge. One may picture a chilly climate where nor teacher neither students care that much about learning. And even if teacher really cares about students’ success how much she can do to change pedagogy considering existing institutional pressure. Can she make growth priority rather than proficiency, for example? Michael Wesch in his inspirational talk about learning, illustrates grading as climbing a mountain; he emphasizes on experience rather than final destination. There is not such thing as failure in this system, if one couldn’t get to upper stages during the process, she is not done yet, she needs more work. Climbing happens in a group, it is a community-based process.
Building on the notion of community and the importance of working together, Gardner Campbell sees the role of community, looking at broader picture. He addresses experiential learning, not necessarily in its traditional meaning, but practices within community with emphasis on connection and collaboration. One may think of community engagement as one particular approach to implement experiential learning which encourages participation and connection, though its effectiveness may remain under question, deepening on a a variety of issue and more importantly power relations. But what Garner argues is that in digital age “connected learning” through internet offers unique opportunity in which students can collaborate within a social setting and benefit from educational experience that change lives, he emphasizes. Regardless of existing benefits of such network and potential concerns over it, one may doubt if this can be part of a picture to address the major issue of education as Garner argues, becoming more about career and competencies rather than knowledge inquiry and understanding. It is worthy to explore…
Contemporary Pedagogy S18 
It is definitely worthy of exploring. Thank you for your thoughts, I particularly appreciate how you point out the learning within a community feel to all of it. And the community is not just the classroom anymore, it can be anyone across the planet who has a decent internet connection.
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I agree that networked learning is an idea that I am willing to explore. I however still need to be convinced that any type of teaching model that come from it is designed to work for the average student. Those of us obtaining our masters or a PhD are high achieving students, and work most likely be able to excel at an online course. research put out by Columbia suggest that students in online courses are more likely to withdraw, struggling students fail more often, achievements gaps increase, etc. Those are the statistics of average students, and I know anyone can find research in their defense, but I can find countless studies with a basic Google search that support this conundrum. I think there is a solution, however that idea hasn’t been born in the mind of an innovative teacher yet.
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The part of your blog that I enjoyed the most is your mention of community within the classroom; thank you! I feel in academia that we often forget that our classrooms are a community created by the students and professors in the shared space. Sometimes this community is thriving and other times it may be fighting to survive. As we move further into the 21st century, professors and students must be cognizant that classroom community is not only created and cultivated by those in one shared classroom space, but it also happens online (i.e. blogs and websites, social media) and around the world with other colleagues. While I’m still figuring out the usefulness of blogging in the classroom, I do believe that it aids in creating a brave space for professors and students alike to disseminate information and learn and grow with each other.
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I think I have a fair understanding of the issue you raise about power relations and classical authority of the “Teacher” in classrooms. And I wholeheartedly believe in a need for change. But then the difficulty, in my opinion is STEM. Science seems to be, by its nature, an authoritarian field that gives ultimate power to reason and logic. So it becomes very convenient that its education becomes mostly teachers feeding information (Truth) to students. And then, of course, the notions of community building that you refer to in your post becomes so sparse in engineering classrooms.
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